Saturday, December 13, 2014

I was reading the Amazon KDP forums the other day when I saw an author lamenting the lack of sales after a free promotion. The author of the post was Michael W. Parres (whose book is titled "Shades of Retribution".) Here's a snippet of what he said:

"After one day of posting, you register 350 downloads, and gleefully wait for the “promotion bounce” to generate expected sales. Unfortunately, your hope is quickly dashed, with zero sales."

He concludes in the post:

"Amazon’s “free book” promotions (along with allowing free book pricing outside of promotional schemes) have pulled millions of potential buyers out of the e-book market, thus reducing demand for books that carry a price. People have become conditioned to pay nothing, or very little for the pleasure of reading an e-book. To quote a friend: “Why should I pay for a book, when there are tons I can get for free?” "

I wrote a long response that, upon reflection, could be useful to the writing community at-large. Not that people read this blog in droves. Still, better than buried as a comment on forum.

***

The free model for obtaining books has existed since the dawn of reading with the invention of libraries. Free gets people talking. Free gets people reading. The KDP Select free periods are excellent in garnering reviews, sales, etc. - if you do it right. You only got a couple hundred downloads. That may seem like I'm tossing off a decent number... but actually, that number might as well be zero. Allow me to expand.

There are people out there who reap every free book that come out hourly on Amazon's top "free" lists. They select specific categories and just download the top 100 books of that category, then move on to the next. By weeks end they've culled thousands of books. To what end? You might ask. Wouldn't they not have enough drive space for this? You follow with. The answers are simple: they delete after purchase and the more free period books they snatch and delete, the more they can browse the Kindle library at their leisure and redownload any books that might interest them that were previously free... without having to purchase. I know of a few people that claim to run bots that do this. There are also many many people who regularly trawl the free list and get bunches of books with the intention of someday reading them in the future. But they are usually lying to themselves.

If you only get a couple hundred downloads, you might as well have gotten zero. It's no wonder it didn't result in sales for you. Most self published authors regard the free promotion as a set it and forget it kind of thing. Sure, they'll share the link on their twitter. Maybe they'll post it to facebook, too. But that's about the same as shouting in the mirror. You may feel like you look good doing it, but ultimately you're talking to yourself.

The benefits of putting your book out for free, even if it isn't part of a series, is numerous if you promote it correctly. Here's just a few benefits (assuming you can get up to 1,000 downloads or more during your free period):

Purchases of other books of yours that aren't free if you have any

Money from Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Online Lending Library (you get your royalty if any of those free downloaders lends your book and someone reads more than 10% of it! This accounted for about a quarter of my earnings in September, for example.)

Improved position in searches for keywords (this is an oft overlooked thing for people taking advantage of free periods)

Improved population in 'Also bought' lists (The more downloads you get, the more you'll be populated with more popular books)

and more. That's just the base of the mountain.

Instead of lamenting about free, you should view self publishing as a game. Since your end goal seems to be sales, this is important. (People who publish for the love of writing needn't worry about playing the game.) I will outline what the game is and perhaps you'll give another crack at going free for two or three days and see how it goes.

Level One - Preparation

Knowing the whole of the map can only help your journey.

Set up the free days. Three days is decent. Two days is more precious. Next, grab a link to your book. Search for free book submit on Google. You'll find many blogs and Facebook pages that will accept your link for consideration on the day of. My book got featured on one such Facebook page called Pixel of Ink. It hit #16 overall free. That's right, out of the massive amount of books for free, I got to #16. It was awesome. I digress. If you give these blogs and sites a weeks notice and they happen to check out your work, you'll get lucky and be featured.

Another bit of preparation is participation in online groups. Go to Facebook writers groups. Find some reader clubs. Go on reddit and participate in some of the chin wagging there. Make friends. This will require at least a months preparation for people to get to know you. I wrote a blog post about a few places I posted when my book was free (it's an earlier entry but easy to find) -- use some of those links and make your face a familiar one on those pages or sites. People will be more keen to reshare / repost / etc. if you are known to them and help them out, joke with them, and have fun.

Level Two - Charting and Keywording

Two authors, seen here, hammering away at the competition.

The night before your free promotion, you have some things to mull over. Chief among them? What keywords do you want to chart with. I wanted to beat out the competition and be tops when people searched for "Writing Prompts". Go to amazon now and type in Writing Prompts. See if you can find my book of 1,000 awesome writing prompts. (Keep in mind, before I decided to view this as a game, I was content with being on page 15 overall.) How did I start to climb the rankings? I had researched and read countless blog posts and one made mention of adding keywords you thought people might search for at the end of the url. So, for me, it was &keywords=writing+prompts -- does it actually work? Some people argue that it doesn't. I feel I've logged enough proof (also on my blog, I did a live experiment) that seems to prove otherwise. Just think of the phrase people would likely use to find a book in your genre and go for it. People tend to not type more than two word phrases so keep it simple!

Next up is charting. That's where you climb up the ranks of your category and get as giddy as a schoolgirl the higher you climb. My last adventure with free saw me at #331 overall and #1 in the highly competitive Writing Skills category. If you're able to chart highly in a category, this will result in more downloads from people who only browse the top ten free of a particularly good category.

How can you control that climb? Well, remember level one? You're going to first ask friends and followers on twitter and your personal facebook page to share your url (Remember, include those keywords in that url!) Then you wait an hour. Then you perhaps post on one or two (not ALL!) facebook groups that you're a member of. Then you wait an hour. Then you post on one of the social media sites like Reddit's "freeebooks" subreddit. Then you wait an hour. Then you post a little something on another subreddit and one other facebook group you haven't hit yet. Then you wait. Get the pattern? Why wait, some may ask. Because, my friend, there's a thing called time zones. Smattering your links across a wide swath of places and times will result in more people seeing your link. Remember, this is a game, you need to be crafty!

Level Three - Final Level!

Curse you, AAA! How do you always get the high score?!

Think of the # overall position free your place on a scoreboard for a video game. When you play a video game, do you try to only aim for 1,000th place? Or do you want to be in the top 500? Wouldn't the top 100 be better? Top 20? #1? Every time you do a KDP Select Free period, try to get a better position than before. Write down things you felt worked and things you felt were a waste of your time. Try to replicate what seemed to give you a boost and multiply it be researching more. You'll need to do more than one free period to maximize that free period bump. There are millions upon millions of books on Amazon. What makes yours better? Refine your blurb. Make it something you'd read. Be sure you're working on an Amazon Author Central page. Add some particularly good quotes from 5 star reviews to your AAC book page as well. If you're gunna play the promotion game, you're gunna need an attractive and irresistible product.

I've gone on way long here. But I hope I've given you a different perspective on how I view free periods. I self published at the end of April for the first time ever. I put out a softcover version of my book at the end of August (I should have done it sooner!) I sell about 100 copies of the ebook a month. My primary focus has now been promoting the softcover (I devised a different game for myself for that.) Last month my softcover sold 77 copies in total. A record. But guess what, I kept plugging away. It's paid off. So far this month (13 days) I have not only passed my 77 in a month record, I'm at 120 softcover sales. I fully believe that with patience, planning and proper execution, one can see brisk regular sales. Keep challenging yourself. Keep reaching for the high score.

Then you'll get to do it all over again with your next book. But, hopefully, with the added benefit of loyal readers.

Pretty much this.

And remember, many people first discovered their lifelong favorite authors when they first read a book for free from the library.

Saturday, December 6, 2014

My previous post discussed a two day free promotion I did with my book on Amazon. I promised links to the places where I promoted my book but felt a separate post would be best. Before I give the links however, you need to understand how to maximize the effectiveness of your linking.

The first thing you should be doing is building a presence on any site you intend to link with in the future. Don't just pop in, post links to your book and pop out. Nobody will know you. Nobody will click your link. You should contribute to the discussions, comment on other posts, build friendships and continue such activities well after the free period.

The first set of links I'm going to give you highlight the need to do what I just stated. These links are on a site called Reddit. This site imposes the need to participate on you. If you don't participate you won't see activity on any of your links. In fact, if anyone sees anything you link there and you've just created an account to link your stuff, it'll be a miracle. The way Reddit works is that new accounts can't link to stuff more than once over the course of many hours. Sometimes your link will be filtered out if you're a new account, too. Go to http://reddit.com - make an account - go there daily and learn how Reddit works. It's a fun site and it's where I tend to get most traction for free periods for my book. I've also connected with and formed years long friendships with people on the site.

The way Reddit works is, essentially, like a giant forum. Forums have subforums for categories, Reddit has subreddits in the same thought. Here are the subreddits that welcome you to promote your work:

There are more subreddits, but these are the most used ones. There's even regional subreddits like /r/FreebiesUK (and even more for places like Australia, Canada, etc.) but you should primarily stick to the five listed.

What's good about listing your books there is that not only do you get listed on Reddit, but there are bots that autopromote links from there on twitter. Also, since Reddit is such a social type of place, you're more likely to see someone tweet about your book on twitter after they've seen your link on Reddit, then you are if you ask people to retweet you.

The next place you should be promoting is on Facebook. Like Reddit, you ought to be making friends and talking to people there. If you don't, you won't see any traction! However, if you make friends and you post in any of the groups I'm about to mention, those friends might see your post and give it a visibility boost by commenting or liking your post. (If your posts get no likes or comments, it tends to be dead in the water, not showing up in anyones feed.)

There are many more, but that's just ten to get you started. This brings me to my next point:

Don't post everywhere all at once! Stagger your posts for different time zone coverage!

This is key. If you just go link crazy one hour and then expect traction throughout... or if you link everywhere constantly... less people will follow your link. Advertise at most in two places on any particular hour. The next hour go for two completely different places. Heck, give it two or three hours. The more time zones you hit, the more people will notice your links.

This brings me to my next part of where to share your book links: Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and other social media sites that allow hashtags. On all these social media sites, it's important to interact with other users before you ever promote because you'll start building a following. You'll start getting people interested in you as a person and they will be more apt to share your links. When you do share your links on any of these platforms, hashtags are important to include with your post! Example of a right way and a wrong way of formulating a twitter post:

Here's the difference between the right way and the wrong way. The wrong way doesn't explain anything about the book. The wrong way also didn't use hashtags. Why use hashtags? Because people who aren't on your friends list can discover you through hashtags. Also, the right way linked to the book using the &keywords=keyword trick which I described in this previous blog post about making the best of your free promotion period.

When you share on an image type of social media site like Pinterest or Instagram, use a part of your cover or a small section/quote from your book stylized as an image for people that's easy to share.

If you do all of the above properly, you should be able to easily crack the top 600 overall free for your day. If you found this post helpful, be sure to share it! If you have any questions, feel free to ask below.

Sunday, November 30, 2014

Amazon is by far the most popular seller of ebooks. There's no question. If you have any hopes of self publishing a book and having anyone read it, you need to make sure it's available there. However, in a sea of millions upon millions of books, how does one get noticed? Amazon seems to offer one idea: The KDP Select program. There are three primary draws for signing up to KDP Select: 1) The free promotion days (you have five you can use in any 90 day enrollment period), 2) Kindle countdown deals (where your book goes on sale, gets a little promotion, and the price starts out with whatever discount you set and then slowly climbs up to the regular price), 3) The Kindle Online Lending Library (KOLL) and Kindle Unlimited (KU) (users essentially "take out" your book like it's a library book and you get money if they go through more than 10% of the book.)

In the past, I have taken part in the free promotion days. However, this time I wanted to track precisely how well my book, "1,000 Awesome Writing Prompts", performed, where I promoted my book and the resulting statistics for a few days after. Your mileage will vary, obviously. Leading up to my free promotion, I decided to do absolutely no preparation. It was more of a "fly by the seat of my pants" style prep. I would not recommend this to anyone. It's much better to contact blogs and other sites in advance to see if they'll tweet or write a note on Facebook about your book being free on the day of. This will generate more activity than if you rely on yourself to promote it.

One last thing to note before I share with you the results of my experiment: I decided I would make my book free on two of the busiest online shopping days of the season. Thanksgiving and "Black Friday." I wanted to see if this would increase sales during the Saturday, Sunday and "Cyber Monday" that follows it. It should be an interesting ride. (Note: Cyber Monday has yet to happen, this blog post will be updated once Cyber Monday has concluded.)

DAY ONE (Thanksgiving: November 27th, 2014)

12am-11am EST - I did zero promotion, zero linking on any sites. I'm sure the stats won't be impressive. The stats will reflect end of hour totals by the way.

5pm-6pm EST. Once again, just letting the link grow as it should. I will start linking on other sites to help growth (and will link to said sites at the end of this post so you know which sites I promoted with.)

STATS: 222 free downloads overall (+20 downloads/hour.) 1,438 overall. #3 in Writing Skills (being in the top 5 free of Writing Skills will also help downloads.) 1 sale for the day so far of the softcover. 1 sale for the day of the other 99 cent ebook.

6pm-7pm EST. I was delayed in writing this update. I did additional promotion via twitter for this hour, then got sidetracked.

STATS: 241 free downloads overall (+19 downloads/hour.) 1,399 overall. #3 in Writing Skills. 1 sale for the day so far of the softcover. 1 sale for the day of the other 99 cent ebook.

7pm-8pm EST. No additional promotion on sites during this hour. Just seeing where it goes.

STATS: 280 free downloads overall (+39 downloads/hour.) 962 overall. #2 in Writing Skills. 1 sale for the day so far of the softcover. 2 sales for the day of the other 99 cent ebook.

8pm-9pm EST. I promoted the book across a few more Facebook groups. I try to stagger where I link it and try to leave a unique thought or comment with each post depending on what group it is. I figure staggering the links will make it hit across different time zones/areas. One thing I neglected to keep track of was the stats for the stores of the other counties. These have been stats for the us. So in parentheses I will include stats for UK/Canada/Australia.

11pm-12am EST. Posted to one Facebook group. That's about it. Things are winding down as I'll be heading to bed soon, so more updates might be done around 8am EST.

STATS: 406 free downloads overall (+17 downloads/hour.) #620 overall. #2 in Writing Skills. I end the day with a single sale of the softcover. 2 sales for my other 99 cent ebook. (UK: #1,069 / #1 Writing. No surprise here as it is 5am in the UK. CA: #178 OA / #1 Writing. I love Canada! AUS: #6,838 / #6 Writing. Australia showing less love. It's about 6pm on a Friday. Guess everyone's in the brush out there.)

DAY TWO (Black Friday: November 29th, 2014)

7AM EST. Slept. Amazons stats wind up jumping around a bit after midnight EST. It now states that I ended day one with 497 downloads. (Which is always odd since it had already started ticking downloads in the day 2 stats after that 406 count. I guess they just have issues with time zones and the +90 happened between 12am and 3am hours when the day finally ended for all.)

STATS: 61 downloads today. (Starting over the tally.) #347 overall. Still #2 in Writing Skills. The #1 book appears to be at #341. It's a neck and neck race. 0 sales today of the softcover. 0 sales of the other ebook.

7AM-8AM EST. No additional promotion done. Had to drive to work, after all.

10AM-11AM EST. Shared link with the NaNoWriMo community (they only allow people who actively participate to promote there.) Shared a link on Facebook.

STATS: 121 downloads. (+10 downloads/hour. Slowing down, it seems.) #331 overall (holding!) #1 Writing Skills (seems the #1 position isn't doing much in aiding downloads. Or being in the top 400 overall.) 1 sale of the softcover for the day still. 0 sales of the other ebook. (There was insignificant change in the international stats.)

11AM-12PM EST. Shared some links on Facebook. Not much else for promotion.

12PM-1PM EST. No promotion during this hour. Lunch time. I think links elsewhere during the next hour is best to goose the numbers. Still above where I was yesterday, though.

STATS: 145 downloads. (+10 downloads/hour.) #345 overall (holding!) #1 Writing Skills. 2 sales of the softcover today (yay! I like softcover sales. But this is a margin of error thing of +/- 2 sales a day even before my free promotion. 3 or more would be abnormal.) 0 sales of the other ebook. (International stats holding and, really... I think they're not worth tracking at this point.)

2PM-3PM EST. This is the hour where we see how much fruit blossoms from the flurry of promotion in the previous hour.

STATS: 197 downloads. (+22 downloads/hour. Respectable showing.) #373 overall (holding. I'll take it.) #1 Writing Skills (neck and neck with the #2 spot holder. If I drop down 10 spots, I'm at #2 again.) 4 sales of the softcover for the day. Nice! An expected boost there. +2 for the hour. 1 sale of the other ebook. (It would take 2 sales of the 99 cent ebook to be out of the norm, however.)

3PM-4PM EST. The interesting part of my experiment started taking root. My primary goal for the free period was to improve the visibility when people searched for the basic word "Writing." Before, my book didn't show up on any page. This hour it had jumped to page 7 overall and page 6 when you searched in either the Kindle department or the physical books department.

STATS: 233 downloads. (+19 downloads/hour.) #424 overall. (Holding.) #2 Writing Skills. 4 sales of the softcover for the day. 1 sale of the other ebook for the day.

5PM-6PM EST. Still no more movement in page rankings. Letting it "sit" for the rest of the day is what I've decided to do, rather than plug it more in the venues I've already tapped.

STATS: 251 downloads. (+18 downloads/hour.) #466 overall. (At least it wasn't a huge drop.) #2 Writing Skills. 4 sales of the softcover for the day. 1 sale of the other ebook for the day.

7PM-8PM EST. Not much to report once again during this hour, except an unexpected bump in downloads.

STATS: 300 downloads. (+49 downloads/hour. Second largest download amount of the experiment.) #493 overall. (But that jump didn't help with my stat here.) #2 Writing Skills. 4 sales of the softcover for the day. 1 sale of the other ebook for the day.

8PM-9PM EST. I guess we'll get to see if that jump in downloads helped the stats in this next hour.

STATS: 318 downloads. (+18 downloads/hour.) #547 overall. (Nope. Still dropping.) #2 Writing Skills. 4 sales of the softcover for the day. 2 sales of the other ebook for the day (Hey, a sale is a sale.)

9PM-10PM EST. With the bummer of dropping down a bunch of points, at least I'm still in the top 600 overall. Let's see if I'm able to close out the last few hours in the top 600.

STATS: 338 downloads. (+20 downloads/hour.) #555 overall. (Not a huge drop, I'm fine with this.) #2 Writing Skills (Glad this is holding.) 5 sales of the softcover for the day! Another softcover sale! 2 sales of the other ebook for the day.

10PM-11PM EST. Just two hours left of my tracking. This hour and the next. Let's see how far the bottom is.

STATS: 356 downloads. (+18 downloads/hour.) #595 overall. (Still top 600! Ha!) #2 Writing Skills. 5 sales of the softcover for the day. 2 sales of the other ebook for the day.

11PM-12AM EST. The final hour. I'll write a bit of conclusion after the stats of this hour.

STATS: 386 downloads. (+30 downloads/hour.) #577 overall. (Ended the day by starting to climb back up and staying in the top 600. A high note.) #2 Writing Skills (Awesome to hold on top the top two spots for a good majority of the time.) 4 sales of the softcover for the day. 1 sale of the other ebook for the day.)

CONCLUSION

At the end of the day, the "free period" ended for all of Amazon at 3AM EST (or midnight PST.) The downloads of day two equaled 426. With that in mind, here are some stats:

Keyword visibility when searching for "Writing": Last result on page 2 (in the physical books search) | Middle result on Page 3 (when no category is specified at all) | Middle result as well on Page 3 (when Kindle books category is selected.) -- These are all awesome results considering I didn't show up on the first 20 pages a few days ago when the basic word "Writing" was searched for. Perhaps this stat will rise in the future.

Keyword visibility when searching for "Writing": Near the middle on page 2 when searching for physical books (it moved up about four positions from the previous day) | Top position on Page 3 (when no category is specified at all) -- So it has moved up here as well! | Middle result on Page 3 (when Kindle books category is selected.) - No change from yesterday on that last category.

Keyword visibility when searching for "Writing": Second position on page 2 (When searching for physical books. Moving up a few more spots. Is this what drove more softcover sales?) | Sixth position on page 2 (when no category is specified at all) -- Moved a few more spots | Top result on Page 2 (when Kindle books category is selected.) - All three categories, a big position change. See note #2 below.

Note (december 2nd): It moved up in searches but down in purchases. I wonder if it moves up to page one if that will help, maybe we shall see. I will record the stats for the end of December 2nd. Then I will wait and see how it improves, if it gets to page one for searches of writing and if that has any effect on sales. Stay tuned!

Note #2 (December 3rd): These notes are written just after midnight. So this thought is about the Dec. 2nd sales. Last night the positon in searches for softcover books improved for my book. Today sales of the softcover jumped from 4 to 12. So we shall see, since the search position improved for all categories to high up or the top spot on the second page, if that results in sales. Then we shall see if in turn the search position improves more. This will tell me (and you) whether or not specific keywords are integral to sales.

Saturday, May 3, 2014

Self publishing a book has been a great learning process for me, I shirked my responsibilites in maintaining this blog but now that I'm done with writing that first book, I can impart some wisdom. I've learned things that I wish I knew in advance that I'd like to share. I considered publishing the book on multiple platforms other than Amazon (nook, ibook, etc.) but instead listened to a friend's advice and enrolled in the KDP select program.

The first couple of weeks, my book was on sale for $3.99. This is what the chart Amazon gives you monitoring my books... success:

You can see the day where I announced the book to friends and family spike. After that, it sometimes sold two copies, sometimes one. Then I tried a single day of the free promotions they allow you to run. In that day I saw a spike of a little over 100 downloads of the book. Sales "picked up" and that's when you see the stretch of three days in a row with four sales a piece. Now I've gone whole hog and am in the middle of a promotion with the book having been available for four days in total (ending this weekend) for free. Here's the current chart:

So far well over 1,000 downloads. I'm currently sitting around #320 overall in the free books chart. I'm at #42 in Non-fiction. I actually have reviews now, which the book lacked. Will this translate to sales after the free period is over? Yes, and the following tips ought to help explain why.

--------------

1. I whored myself out, there's no way of sugar coating it. I searched for every single blog, facebook group and subreddit that I could find that was dedicated to announcing free ebooks. You might be like me and feel like you're spamming, but you've got to do it. I found this site: http://www.trainingauthors.com/facebook-groups-for-authors/ which had a lot of links that welcomed your linkage of the book. Then there's Reddit. One of the most popular sites currently on the internet. Before you post there, you should make an account at least a month in advance and post thoughtful comments and links not related to any of your own projects, otherwise nobody will see your posts. The best "subreddits" to post a link to your book are: /r/KindleFreebies, /r/eFreebies, /r/FreeEBOOKS, /r/selfpublish.
2. I asked friends to retweet, or share a link on Facebook to it. People don't mind doing that as much if it's free. When you do tweet, putting relevant hashtags like #freebie #freekindle #freeebook #indiepub #kindle are a must if you want people outside of your universe to find it. Use more hash than a hippie at a Grateful Dead concert in the 70's.
3. When you link to your book make sure that the keywords you want it to rank higher in are in the URL! You will want to add sr=1-40&keywords=whatever+keywords+you+want+here to the end of your books url. For me the phrase I wanted my book to show up higher on was "Writing Prompts". My url is: http://www.amazon.com/1-000-Awesome-Writing-Prompts-ebook/dp/B00JOVSYC2/sr=1-40&keywords=writing+prompts -- before this free experiment, my book showed up on the tenth page overall in kindle books when you searched for writing prompts. It has climbing a few pages a day since then and is now almost to the top of the second page when you do a search in the kindle store. Hopefully it shows up on the first page by the end of Sunday, but even the second page is great.
4. Make your author profile so people can easily start following you or contacting you. Do this before you start promoting your book because they warn you that it can take up to two days for your author profile to show up on the books you're selling. https://authorcentral.amazon.com/ is the place to go.
5. Make any changes to your book cover at least two days before you do any big promotion. I wasn't happy with my original cover so I had a friend design a new cover. It changed in the book itself within six hours, but it took two days for the cover to change in the item listing and anyone who downloaded it during that time got the old cover.

I hope this helps some of you. I'm still learning and hopefully will pick up even more tips along the way to impart to all of you. Keep being awesome. :)